The present invention relates to a selecting device for interfacing between a telephone line, a facsimile machine and a facsimile card installed in a computer.
The personal computer and facsimile machine or telecopier, at present, are common office equipments, and are also gradually being applied to family use. However, the conventional facsimile machine has some inherent inconveniences in its operation. For example, the information to be transmitted must be first presented as printed matter or a still picture which can be inserted into and scanned by the machine. The facsimile machine cannot be set in advance to transmit the same subject matter to several different places. Although some facsimile machines can be set automatically to feed the paper sheets into the machine for scanning and transmitted at a desired time, they cannot be set to transmit several different subject matters at different times. In addition, they do not have storage facilities for received information and information to be transmitted for consultation by the user. To solve the above-described problems, someone suggested employing a personal computer to build up a facsimile system.
Referring now to FIG. 1, there is illustrated a suggested facsimile system. The system includes a personal computer 100, a facsimile card 102 installed in the computer 100, a high-resolution scanner 104 and a high-resolution printer or laser printer 106. The scanner 104 and printer 106 are coupled with the facsimile card 102 respectively, and have the scanning and printing functions of the conventional facsimile machine. The facsimile card 102 has the functions of exchanging protocols, setting the baud rate, trasmitting and receiving facsimile signals, and other control functions, which are included in the conventional facsimile machine. The facsimile card 102 also efficiently combines the personal computer 100, scanner 104 and laser printer 106 so that the computer's abilities at word processing, CAD/CAM, file/information management, storage, etc. can be added in the facsimile system. Therefore, the facsimile signals sent from the exchange 110 or the scanner 104 can be stored in the storage equipment, such as the hard disk, of the computer 100. Then the user can employ the computer 100 to display and/or amend the stored information, to send it to the laser printer 106 so as to print out, or to transmit it to the other facsimile machine or facsimile system 115 through the telephone line 108 and the exchange 110. Also, it is possible to transmit the same subject matter to several different places at desired times or different subject matters to different places at different times, respectively, by the control of the personal computer 100.
Furthermore, the document created by the personal computer 100 can be transmitted to the other facsimile machine 115 directly through the facsimile card 102 and the exchange 110 without need of a print out. Since several personal computers can be easily combined together, they can commonly utilize one scanner and one laser printer.
The above facsimile system is advantageous over the conventional facsimile machine, but the high-resolution scanner and printer are too expensive to be commonly used. At present, the price of a scanner or laser printer is about 2000.00 to 3000.00 U.S. dollars, and the price of a facsimile machine is about 1670.00 to 3000.00 U.S. dollars. In addition, when the above facsimile system is adopted, the previous facsimile machine must be discarded.